Broadcom Clarity Reviews

We are working on the development for CA PPM, building a couple of portlets, a couple of objects for better usability for CA PPM users in our company. We try to provide automation of CA PPM and easy access, easy usability. Also, easy reporting for our users.

It's really performed well. I personally started from CA PPM 7.5.3 to PPM 15.2. There has been great innovation regarding the development, regarding the technologies.

I see the benefits for the organization in the Resource Management. No more Excel sheets for resource management, no more Excel sheets for financial management, no more data retention for reporting purposes. It is pretty quick in calculations for the managers and financial teams, and getting them the data.

The financial management part because it calculates, it retains the data, and everything is pretty much cool about the reporting part for financial. For PMOs it has some cool reporting and a dashboard. That is a good part of CA PPM. 

I want to see the mobile product. And, if possible, integration for SMS functionality.

In terms of stability, along the journey from the Clarity 12.0 to 15.2, it has become a good, stable product now. They are bringing a lot more performance improvements to the product, and the database side also. So now it is pretty much a stable product.

In terms of performance, I would say scalability is around an eight out of 10.

The support guys are pretty much technical. They respond back to me as soon as there is a ticket with them. The conversation is good and we've had a lot of quick solutions.

No, we didn't have a previous solution. But in terms of managing projects, when we saw a lot of complexity in the managing of projects, we realized we needed to go for a PPM and try it once.

It is pretty much cool. And I would say the setup and the upgrade capabilities from CA, the way they have it implemented and prepared the end script is pretty much cool.

Only CA PPM.

Moving ahead, I am looking forward to CA PPM mobile technologies, the mobile app for PPM users, that would also be a good addition to the user experience.

The new UX is pretty cool. I would rate it about an eight out of 10. I joined in the demo for a couple of users for the new timesheet UI. They feel a little bit cool about it, and I have put one idea forward for the timesheet UI and that is with CA. But the new UI is pretty cool, and the "Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down" approach for the approval or rejection of the timesheets is a pretty cool approach.

I would say the criteria for investing in a vendor would be how complex the implementation would be for financial, how complex implementation would be for the projects, how complex the implementation would be for Agile.

I rate it a seven out of 10 overall because they are still using SOAP functionalities. I want them to move out of SOAP and go for REST APIs.

Go for the PPM product, try it once, you will see it makes a big difference and you can get a lot of benefit from CA PPM.

It is mainly for handling the project and financial management across the organization. Mostly it is the IT department of the company which uses this tool. We may have a user base, in all, of about 20,000 users. It is also used by all the vendors of American Express. We on-board them onto the tool, and then they are able to track their the time against all the projects which they are working on with American Express.

There are a lot of other use cases.

It helps all the portfolio managers and the program managers to take stock of the financial situation at the program and portfolio level, because it rolls up all the financials at the product level.

We also have integration with CA Agile Central. So we get all the project-related data and the user stories-related data into Clarity and we report on to that: How much funding is there, and how much are the actuals between these two tools?

The resource management, the program management, financial management. It combines a lot of things, all of them are of benefit to our end users.

I don't work as an administrator of the tool, so I can talk from the standpoint of the end users who actually use it. I think financial management would be one of the most important features of all of them, to keep track of the finances. Everyone runs against a budget. They have a particular funding, which they have to manage. So I think the Cost Plans, Financial Planning, those are among the most important features for most users.

I think a lot of things that you'd want to see were touched upon in the roadmap yesterday, which we attended here at the CA World conference, yesterday. With the new UI, the Sub-Object part which they plan to bring into the new UI, I think a lot of customers would be happy to implement the new UI for their companies.

Maybe they could improve the mobile app. I think right now it only offers time sheet. If they can integrate a lot of other components into it - and not only CA PPM, a lot of other companies are now focusing on the mobile apps - I think that would be helpful for the users.

I think after the last upgrade, I think it was 14.2 or 14.3, the performance of the tool has improved a lot. I can see a drastic change in a lot of the stock jobs of the tool. And it has become quite stable.

When we started off - it's been almost eight, nine years now with CA PPM - at that time our user base was a lot more. But now with CA Agile Central coming into the picture, I think a lot of companies are making a shift of moving a lot of their user base from CA PPM to CA Agile Central. So it is cutting across various tools. It does not concentrate on a single tool.

They are very helpful. In fact, we have a bi-weekly call with one of the representatives from CA. And when they are in town, we have a meeting with them and they are very helpful.

I was not involved in the initial setup, I think I joined a couple of months after the initial set up. But I've been there all throughout since then, including upgrades. The upgrades used to be complex. But now, I think it depends on upgrade planning. How often do you upgrade? If you upgrade once in three years, then it can be complex. But if you keep on upgrading as and when CA releases their upgraded version, I think it would be smooth.

Regarding the new UX, we have not actually onboarded that yet. But, we plan to in the near future. From the administration team, we have seen it, we have implemented it in our sandbox environment, but it's not rolled out at the organization level yet. There is still a lot of planning to go into that.

Regarding the most important criterion when selecting a vendor to go with, I think it would be a long-term partnership that the company has with them. If we had already engaged with them in some other products and we see a value, then I think that would be the most important criterion.

I would say that you should first see the problem you are trying to solve in your company. I think if project, resource, and financial management are the things you are trying to solve, then it would be very useful.

We use the time sheet for reporting against tasks. We have a large user group that we keep track of all the time, and where people are spending it. From using the solution, benefits would include knowing what our people are up to, one, being able to post that to GL, we do use it as a sub-ledger. We also are starting more and more to use it for allocating resources, to make sure we understand what the availability of those resources are versus the work that we're asking them to perform.

Ease of use, the user experience has been our biggest obstacle to overcome. I've seen some of the things that they're coming out with next year, and I applaud all of those. It's been long overdue to get that type of user experience into place. I'm going to say user experience, not to sound like a broken record, scalability, we have a constantly growing, we probably grow organically 10% to 15% a year in our user base, so we've got to be able to scale. Stability and ease of support, I'm an application development manager, so we've got to be able to put in some changes, upgradability and things of that nature. All of that kind of comes together for my perspective, that's what I look for.

That's going to be kind of multifaceted for us. We've used the product since the late '90s on ABT, went live with Niku in 2004, that became Clarity, and then CA bought out Niku, so we've come a long way over a long time.

We have a very stable environment. We had our first outage, unplanned outage, this year for the first time in six years, and it was not due to the product, it was due to a third part vendor did something they shouldn't have.

Very scalable. We have, like I said, over 12,000 users right now, and I feel no problem, given enough money and time, that would scale up to whatever. I've discussed with other users of the same product that use many more than that.

It's been mixed. We get some technical support folks that know exactly what the need is, and we've had some that I've had to escalate a number of times before we could get an issue fixed.

Initial set up, user adoption was a little rough in the beginning, especially with the technology at the time. It was new, we were coming from a homegrown, "I have exactly what I want", to trying to use out of the box technologies.

I would put it right at a 7 to an 8/10, because I like what it is. It provides all the solution you need, the only takeaway, or coming off that 10 mark, is the user experience and the user interface. Forward looking to what the application is going to become by the time you go live and what you're going to do with it, not necessarily looking back and talking to users of long past, like myself, we have had it for a long time, but I try and keep my fingers on the pulse of what's coming.

The most valuable features is the broad spectrum ability to pull in all of our portfolio information and drive that down to where the end result outputs to our financials. This allows us to close books each month.

We're a private company, so we do a lot around CapEx from the perspective of revenue and how all that is driven from a financial perspective, so by having a broad overview of bringing things in through ideation and portfolio management and approvals for money spent, we're able to keep a pretty good control over that from a holistic, enterprise-wide perspective.

Particularly in our technology department, we get approvals for projects, expenditure for each project, and when the projects are approved, we're able to track them on the portfolio down to the project-level.

This is from a global-perspective too, as we're headquartered in Nashville but we have heavy usage over in Asia, Hong Kong, and our Tokyo office. CA PPM is pretty good in getting a really granular, line-item overview of where we're at, pretty much almost real-time from expenditures.

They've got to come up to the year 2015 on user interface. It's really just not there. We've recently been looking at other products, wondering if we want to make a move. We don't really think that's the right answer, but at the same time we're hoping to see something here to help us with what we're doing.

They've really failed to innovate on the user-interface perspective. The complexities of the product are it's strength and it's weakness. We have a poor level of user adoption right now, just because it's so hard for people who who go in just once a week to do something. It's difficult for project managers to go in and remember how to do it, get through things in the user interface. We're kind of hoping to see something here at this conference, future road maps for user interface improvements, HTML5, whatever, to lessen some of those qualms.

Deployment has had no issues.

Stability’s fine. It's feature-rich, and that's fine.

No issues whatsoever.

I don't believe that we've had any instance that made it outside of our internal support in recent memory.

We recently upgraded to 14.2, and that was smooth and issue-less.

It's functionality is way up there at a grade of 9-8 out of 10. It's the industry leader in what you can do with it. The ability to get in and do that stuff, for people maybe with a lower technical aptitude than guys like us at these conferences, the user interface would make it a 4.

Make sure you have a PMO in place that is a very strong center of knowledge for your project managers. Also, make sure you're providing solid training on the usage of the tool. If you elect to go with a more agile model where you're kind of doing away with PMO, then what happens is you lose that center of knowledge about the use of PP MCA, and as I mentioned before, the complexity of the use of it is it's weakest point. We're experiencing a lot of problems with that right now.

We started looking for a tool to manage our resources, that was our primary driver. Resource capacity utilization, resource management. But of course, the other features that are available, portfolio management, project management, we definitely wanted to use those as well. So, primarily, resource management, but project management and portfolio management as well.

It's an excellent tool for resource management. I really like the new interface, the user experience, which is coming out soon. Right now, it's something of a legacy format, and it's a little bit - I wouldn't say difficult to navigate - but people are used to very intuitive interfaces. Currently it looks like, "Ah, it's a legacy interface." But with the new one, I think it's making a really big impact. We have not started using it yet, though. We are currently using 15.2, which has some of those features. So we are waiting for 15.3 to start making use of them. 

For resource management, it's a very strong tool, has all the features that you would desire in a resource management tool, so we're very happy with that.

Basically everything. 

• You can identify resources by roles.
• You can manage by skill level.
• You can manage your capacity by roles.
• Assigning to projects.
• Booking resources in Soft Book, Hard Book.
• Gives you visibility into who is currently working on something else but may be available through the Soft Book feature.

I like every feature that's in there.

A little bit better financial management. Right now it is more accountant-related, the financial management - of course, it's finance, it has to be financial. But it should be a little bit easier for project managers.

To give an example, if you have a non-labor cost that you're tracking, let's say a software expenditure or license subscription, tracking that you need to manage as a resource in the project plan, that adds a lot of effort for product managers to maintain. If they can come with ways of simplifying the cost and financial management, that would be one thing that we would really like.

Never had any issues with a CA product.

In terms of scalability, it is a little bit slow. Right now we have about 200 users, and we are bringing on our European counterparts as well - our company acquired another company - and we are trying to bring them on. It is slow. We've created a support ticket, and hopefully they'll respond. I think for regular day-to-day operations, it's okay. But when you get into Jaspersoft reporting, it is slow. And nowadays, people don't have patience, I don't have patience.

Technical support, they're good. They get back to us pretty quickly. Never had any issues with them either. They get back to us quickly, they try to resolve the issue. They are definitely knowledgeable.

We were Microsoft Project Server users. I think about seven years ago we started using Project Server with the same goals of a centralized repository and collaboration for project managers and team members; also, resource and financial management. We never got to the resource and financial management part of it, because I think on the time sheets side we were aggressive, and that did not go well with the resources, so we started using it only as a project repository.

We were in it all the time, and every year when there was a new demand for projects, and we were trying to set the portfolio for the next year, the question always was, "Okay, who's available to take up which projects?" And every time it was a spreadsheet, and I was working with 50 resource managers bringing their allocations and merging them; it was a nightmare. 

And at any point in time, especially when a new demand would come in during the middle of the year, if you wanted to inject that project into the portfolio, we didn't know what the impact of that would be on other resources. Again, it would be another big round of, "Okay, call all the resource managers." 

So that was our key need for the PPM tool.

I think our decision was the right one. We went with the minimum configuration. We wanted to use it out of the box as much as possible. A CA consultant came and I think we had him for about three months. They came and gathered the requirements and configured it a little bit to suit our requirements and I did some additional fields here and there, but mostly out of the box. He was very knowledgeable, he helped us in setting up easily. 

Right now we're in the adoption mode, and our timesheet compliance is around 92%. We're just about three months into it, and I really like it. We have still yet to use all the other features that come with CA PPM.   

We are focusing for now on project management, and generating reports, out of that: status reports, timesheets, reporting on actuals. We want to get to the next phase where resource utilization capacity is accurately defined in CA PPM as well. Financial planning, it was initially out of the scope, but I think as soon as they started seeing actual costs in the system, everybody wanted to see, "Okay, what's the budget every month? What was the planned cost?" and things like that. So we're trying to put that data in, and set up processes for keeping it up to date and things like that. So far, so good.

Regarding the new UX, it's very good. I wish it would come out faster, but I know that it has to be developed, tested, and rolled out. I like the way they're doing it in something like an Agile format, giving you some features and then gathering feedback and improving them, instead of trying to wait for a big bang, which I think might take couple years for them to finish. So, I like that. Could it be faster, is the only question.

When selecting a vendor, when our company is looking at vendors, we develop the RFP, gather our requirements and it has multiple sections: 

• The financial stability of the vendor
• Where are they in user ratings, are they in the top quadrant? 
• How long they've been in the system?
• Are they the industry leader? 
• Are they committed to this product? We don't want to deal with a small company which has really good looking reports right now, but you don't know whether they're going to be in the business or not. 
• How much they meet our requirements, obviously. 
• We also look at how big they are in terms of supporting us.
• We want to make sure they have a broader customer base.
• They are constantly working on product improvements and things like that.
• And that they are there if you need help in implementation. Are resources from their side available to come and help us? We typically prefer people who are in the U.S., but not necessarily.

In terms of advice to others, there are a lot of players in the market. This is a major transition for our whole industry. You have DevOps coming in, you have Agile, you have a lot of other things automated - data creation and the like. You want to pick a vendor who can help you in all those things. 

PPM is one part of the tool. There is also the argument about whether product managers will be there in 2020? So you want to look at something that is more current and has all these new technologies incorporated. If they're not incorporated, at least that they have those planned, so later on you can start to bring them on board.

And during the implementation, I would definitely say start simple. Start as simple as possible. Give as little additional work to each of your resources as possible. Then slowly, once you start to prove the value of the tool, you can slowly start to make more and more improvements on the new features.

The most valuable features are portfolio management and the resources; resources are the key for us.

It has benefited us as we can prioritize which products or projects we need to focus on throughout the calendar year and then correctly allocate the qualified resources to those projects.

We are in a SaaS environment, so we don't have direct access to the database. If in some way, we could access the database through that, it would be great.

Stability of this product is good. We had supported over 300 users and I haven't seen any problems at all.

It could handle a vast amount of data and a huge number of users that are using the tool simultaneously.

I have not used technical support.

We weren't using any sort of PPM tools earlier, it was all through spreadsheets.

In my opinion, the most important criteria for choosing a vendor should be knowledge, experience, willing to walk the customer through their issues, understanding what problems they have and how the vendor can help them achieve their goals.

The initial setup was straightforward. Using the tool, you can navigate it, tell it what to do or what not to do.

They should look at the tool itself because it's a powerful tool. It can do a lot of things, cover a lot of ground quickly and it can easily be picked up as far as skill sets go.

This tool solves a lot of the project-related issues. Right now, we're just figuring out how to use the resources.

We are mostly using this tool for financial purposes, moreover for financial reports. The reporting is based on the CA PPM tool; thus we mainly use it for finances.

Although we have integration with different payroll systems such as AP and FA, at the end of the day we are getting the financial information from GL for our accounting purpose. This is our main purpose for using this tool.

It has definitely improved the working of our organization. Now we have a controlled PPMO that is handling or managing the projects. They have proper guidelines and can apply proper SOX compliance. We have governance for PMs and RMs. Monthly, they review this stuff and they can report on that.

There are some challenges that we are facing in terms of Jaspersoft software. I talked to the product team and they are seriously working on that. I am hoping that another 6 months from now, there will be improvements in the reporting and performance areas that will be very helpful for the user community.

It is too early to discuss stability because we are just going live in the first week of December. Let's see for the next 6 - 8 months how it is working and then it will be more relevant.

We are using it not just in one department but at the enterprise level; also in both our geographical locations, i.e., Canada and the US. The product is scalable.

We have used CA support and they are perfect. They respond back on time and give us the required solution. Even if they are taking more time, they will inform us beforehand. We are okay with their services.

Before this product, we had 3 or 4 legacy systems. One was used for time reporting. It was not a centralized one; only the Canadian people were using it. The US office was using Primavera. We wanted to collaborate everything into a single domain and that is why we selected the CA PPM tool.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor was more flexibility in the CA PPM tool. They were more approachable, so that was another reason.

Depending upon the environment you are in, whether you are on SaaS or on-premises, take the decision based on which environment your company wants to be in and not just get any product. Talk to other banks or any other customers who are in SaaS and have similar requirements. Based on that, make your decision. Since on-premises has some benefits and on the other hand even SaaS has its benefits, so based on that you can select your solution.

The solution can be used for strategic planning. It is also used for portfolio and project management.

The product’s functionalities and suite of services grab the customer’s attention. The product is flexible. It is easy to use. Users can configure the product to match their environment, products, and services.

The architecture must be improved.

We are resellers. We have been presenting the solution to a couple of customers in Kuwait for eight months.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight or nine out of ten. It is very scalable. Around four to five enterprise customers are interested in the product.

We can deploy the solution on the cloud and on-premises.

The subscription is not that expensive. However, the implementation and the services related to it might be a little bit expensive because it's a very unique field. We don't find a lot of people working in this field.

Broadcom Clarity is a popular solution. A lot of third-party research organizations give it a high rating. It is always on the top in Gartner. In our region, Gartner has a big say in the choice of products. Other similar products have some limitations.

I highly recommend the solution to medium to large enterprises. If organizations want to align their business objectives, vision, and mission with the execution on the ground within their departments, they must use Broadcom Clarity. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.